


Don't Go Whistling Dixie on Missionary Ridge

by Anonymississippi



Category: Supergirl (TV 2015)
Genre: Civil War, F/F, General Danvers Week, Halloween Challenge, ghost story
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-11-01
Updated: 2018-11-24
Packaged: 2019-08-13 23:37:18
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 2
Words: 9,177
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16481915
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Anonymississippi/pseuds/Anonymississippi
Summary: On the 25th of November, 1863, the Union broke the Confederate line at Missionary Ridge, southeast of Chattanooga, Tennessee. Some historians argue the confusion of the forward assault on the Ridge by Union soldiers (without direct orders from General Grant) overwhelmed Confederate General Bragg and his troops, prompting an all-out retreat and redeeming the Army of the Cumberland from their earlier defeats around Chickamauga and Lookout Mountain.Those historians are wrong.They never accounted for a general from another planet.Or, the General Danvers Civil War Ghost AU





	1. Chapter 1

Astra had not planned to send a family of four scattering as she marched into the gift shop of the Fairyland Caverns theme park atop the Tennessee mountain on her “consultation” mission with the DEO; neither had she planned on being assaulted by the vacant stares of miniature human-like statues.

Said statues were covered in chipped paint, holding wood-wind instruments, paralyzed in strange stances where no musical notes slid on the air. Instead, the eerie sculptures decayed, despite the gum wads holding crumbly bits of their shin-high bodies together. If she were not in her DEO-issued pants-suit, theoretically muzzled by her human handler who would “do the talking” for the pair of them, she would’ve round-house kicked the creepy concrete creatures or crushed their crumbling heads to gravel in her palm.

“We’re going to need you to evacuate the premises.”

“Uh… you realize there’s customers here, right?”

“Do _you_ realize you are hindering an FBI investigation?” Alex retorted, her brown eyes glimmering. “I’ve got a half-dozen bomb squad agents waiting in a van outside.”

Alexandra continued addressing the employee behind the counter, flashing her fake documentation above her shoulder.

Astra wandered through the aisles of the gift shop, curiously scanning the tiny barn ornaments painted like signs advertising Lookout Mountain and Rock City, and the unsettling Fairyland that had been placed atop its peak. She fingered a dangling set of windchimes, running her hands over the lettering of each of the seven state names engraved in the tiny metal pipes: _Alabama, Carolina, Georgia, Kentucky_. She had not spent much time in this region of the United States before, but then again, she’d never been forced to help out on rudimentary tracking missions for rogue alien hostiles, either.

To Astra’s left was a wall of plush gnome toys. In front of her, a kiosk housing souvenir magnets arranged in alphabetical order. A ceramic gnome sat atop the peak of the mountain magnet, with a speech bubble that read _I survived Look Out Mountain!_ hovering above his head. She scanned the _A_ s quickly and noted that _Alex_ had several magnets to her name.

_Astra_ was… understandably absent.

“—and we need to do a sweep of the grounds here without civilians. This is a matter of national security.”

“Uhm… I’m gonna have to call the manager,” the teenaged cashier responded.

“Then get her on the phone and clear the trails… _now_.”

“What about your— uh…partner?”

“Agent Ze.”

Astra looked back over her shoulder. Alex stood in her dark slacks, the vertical lines of her navy top disguising the firmness of her frame. Her short, cropped hair brushed the edges of her jaw line. Her eyes squinted, perturbed by Astra’s wandering, as she had been since J’onn announced Astra would be accompanying the squad of agents with Alex at the helm, in pursuit of some alien the east coast division of the DEO just didn’t seem to have time enough to track.

From the chatter Astra had gathered, young east coast director Lucy Lane was somewhere in a field in Pennsylvania with an unidentified alien pod, J’onn (with the aid of Winslow) was overseeing an underground alien refugee encampment relocation, Kara was back on the west coast ping-ponging between Catherine Grant and Lena Luther’s offices, lobbying against anti-alien legislation while undergoing numerous scientific tests to appease congress. And Kal-El was—well, who knows where the fledgling heir of El had disappeared to. Likely to his icicle palace for a moment of respite, not that he needed half the rest Kara did these days. Perhaps he had grown so used to the admiration of the masses that he didn’t feel he had a stake in the anti-alien laws, or in Kara’s political tour to dissuade the masses from voting for them.

Couldn’t he see that it was one side against another, and the fight would result in the total subjugation of multiple races, if his support was not flung behind pro-alien leaders?

Astra had little patience for Kal-El’s diplomacy when her very existence depended upon his decisions. She expressed as much last week during the Thanksgiving meal, when she had seen Winn, Lucy, James, Lena, Eliza, J’onn, M’Gann and Cat, all stuffed into Kara’s meager apartment, gathered round a table full of fatty, admittedly delicious-tasting food. Kal-El had come briefly, but then dismissed himself once Astra had confronted him concerning politics. Astra did not apologize to anyone when Kal-El did not linger, least of all Kara. She instead had escaped to the balcony with M’gann’s gifted Perlorian whisky, leaving the congregation to Winn’s disastrous dancing to something called _The Macy’s Parade_. It was only when Alex had come to find her, to ask her if anything was wrong, that she confessed her concerns over Kal-El and his influence on Kara. And there, on the balcony, she found that she and Alex both agreed concerning that less-than-exceptional influence, as they agreed on many other things. Alex had been wearing a magenta sweater, and her cheeks had been flushed as the wind whipped around the corner of the apartment balcony.

She had looked… quite becoming, then.

Alex looked rather irritated now, staring Astra down in the kitschy souvenir depository, old-American décor eliminating any modern connection whatsoever to National City, or California, for that matter. Astra thought she spotted a wagon wheel in the corner.

“We’ll need your CCTV recording for the past 72 hours,” Astra muttered blithely. “From these three cameras here…” she indicated the security cameras in the ceiling corners, and the maniacal, four-foot gnome with the blinking red eye that apparently… stopped people from stealing gnome merchandise. Because gnome merchandise was something that humans would steal, to Astra’s utter bafflement. “As well as any footage you have of the paths toward the peak. Especially the exterior footage near the falls.”

“Uhm…sure, I just… uh, I gotta call the manager.”

“Sometime this century would be most helpful,” Astra replied drolly.

Alex huffed, then turned back to address the teenager behind the counter. His name was also Alex, according to a gnome-shaped nametag, but his pimply face and jittery demeanor didn’t align at all with characteristics Astra had come to associate with his namesake.

The determined way she pushed through the back doors, the steady tread of her more formal footwear crunching over dead leaves, and the resolute fashion in which she communicated that the pair of them split up, weapons drawn (or in Astra’s case, no weapons drawn), in the event that they did stumble upon the creature they’d been tracking across the southeast for the past five days—all of Alexandra’s actions culminated in some inescapable gravity.

It was an attraction Astra had been reckoning with for months upon months since she deserted Myriad, and the emotions were terribly confusing. So viscerally personal yet foreign, like nothing she had ever felt before on Krypton. She would have been glad for this mission, something of an old-fashioned fugitive hunt if she and the unit had not been quartered in separate sectors of the mountains around _Chattanooga_ (what a strange name), some in neighborhoods, most in cabins, and all paired for safety and accountability’s sake. And since all save one in the DEO were still scared as shit of her optical laser beams, she was forced to hunker down and search for aliens in the woods with Alex alone, which most certainly did not help with the funny feeling in her stomach.

“Astra, do you copy?”

Astra waved the families evacuating the trails past her, and adjusted the volume of her earpiece.

The grainy pitch of Alex’s voice through the device was so loud it grated. She had asserted that she didn’t need the com, but there was no other way to sync her mic so that Alex could hear _her_ , so she donned the primitive tech but had grumbled all the while.

“Copy.”

“Anything on your end?”

“No signs of environmental disturbance,” Astra said, pausing at a bluff to gaze out over the valley, the city nestled snugly in the river loop below.

It was certainly no booming, sprawling metropolis like National City, but brick buildings sprouted skyward and squiggly interstates cut through the fire-colored forests. The Tennessee River curled overtop the northern border of the city, its bright blue bridge so eerily similar to one of the walking bridges in Kandor that Astra had taken a moment upon their arrival to settle her rogue memories, and the heavy feelings that accompanied them.

A branch crackled underfoot, and Astra tore her eyes from the horizon. Most of the civilian tourists who had (for some reason) paid their entrance fees to the gnome garden had already abandoned the trails, so any signs of movement were worthy of note. She dismounted from her perch on the rocks and fine-tuned her super hearing to the shuffle, recognizing heavy, panting breaths, the click-clack of teeth snapping against each other, and a skittered, whimpering noise held in check only by the rattling lungs producing it. Whoever was running was not healthy. And judging by the speed with which they stumbled blindly through the forests (probably tripping over those Rao-blessed gnomes), the person was also _terrified_.

Astra rounded a bend just as a human dressed in blue rushed through the bracken on the right side of the trail. Stumbling out of the underbrush, the figure looked no older than Carter, Cat’s adolescent son whom she, occasionally, helped with his calculus work. The boy tumbled to the earth, flinging his arms out before him and cringing as his palms scraped the dirt below. When he landed, something heavy, wooden, and dangerous thumped behind him.

_A rifle._

“Magnus?” the boy said, turning over and crawling back like a crab avoiding an oncoming tide of destruction. “Magnus, get out of there!”

Another man in blue, larger, older, came backpedaling out of the brush, his gun raised to his shoulder and his eye trained over the sight.

“The creek, Virgil, we’ll have to ford it further south.”

“I’m not going back… not with that—that _thing_ waiting for us! Did you see it coming out of the smoke?”

“You’d rather be shot a coward? I’ll not abide your death, ‘n your pa’ll have my head.”

“Not if ma’ skins you first.”

“Get that rifle ready, boy. We’ll move southwest and leave Bragg to his fate… keep inside the ‘Bama line if we have to.”

“Is it still coming?”

“Think I lost it midway up the climb… those claws leave my heart sore a’feared.”

“God have mercy.”

“Uhm… gentlemen?”

The two men in threadbare blue uniforms turned back to look at Astra before the taller, standing one—Magnus, Astra thought she’d heard—raised his rifle and aimed it at her heart.

“There’s no need for that,” Astra raised her arms for show, but pointed absently to the rifle trained at her chest as she approached. The boy scrambled up to standing, grabbing at his rifle to mimic the older black gentleman. “What is pursuing you?”

“Naught your concern, uhm… m’am?” the blonde boy replied, tilting his head to the side and giving her black boots, pants, button-up shirt and jacket the once-over. Her hair was down but the white streak at her brow she’d clipped back, if only to see if Alex would mention it earlier that morning.

She hadn’t.

And Astra had forgotten her motives for doing so, until both men regarded her so curiously.

“That’s a m’am alright, Virgil,” Magnus said, lowering his gun from his shoulder.

He tucked the stock underneath his ribs, so the barrel wasn’t technically pointed away from her. Magnus was a large individual, and Alex noted blisters on his hands and a semi-circular scar beneath his left cheek. On his left wrist was an ugly, raised scar of flesh in the shape of a capitalized _T_. He seemed exceedingly wary, where the boy below him—skinny as a skeleton with poor dental hygiene and sallow cheeks—was most intrigued by her presence.

“Though a queerer woman I’ve not seen in a month of Sundays.”

“Did you not hear the loudspeaker?” Astra asked, puzzled herself. “To evacuate? This area is under FBI surveillance.”

“F-B-who?” Magnus asked.

“I am going to reach for my badge in my left pocket,” Astra said, pointing down toward her hip.

“Badge?” Virgil asked.

“My papers,” Astra explained, just as perplexed as the other two. Alex had recited the same speech multiple times whenever they walked into an establishment as part of their canvassing. She believed her phrasing was correct and authoritative, but the men seemed to have no clue what she was talking about. “For my identification and rank.”

“What rank is you?” The blonde youth stuck his chin up toward the man at his elbow. “You think she’s one of Fightin’ Joes’ tagalongs? He mighta’ leftover a contingent after pursuit down the creek.”

“From what the commander told me, he was stationed on far south side. But you gone’ on and ask her if she’s with Hooker’s Division in that get-up—gone’ give a _woman_ command, now I seen everything. I ain’t lookin’ for trouble with no white lady.”

“Even if she a yank? There’s no greys in sight save her. Saying she got a rank ‘n all.”

“Former general, actually,” Astra grumbled, displeased with the pair chatting as if she weren’t standing right in front of them. The pair snapped to attention at that, which prompted Astra to soften her tone. Best not to let too much of her own history seep into her current job. “Current FBI agent, now. And if you would do as I say I could continue with my investigation. If you do not lower weapons, I will place you under arrest for threatening a federal officer.”

“For which side?”

“What are you talking about?” Astra asked.

“They gone plumb insane up yonder way, hiring a lady general,” Virgil whispered to Magnus.

“I _heard_ that!” Astra snapped, tired of getting nowhere with the two men before her. She marched straight up to them. “Lower your weapons.”

The men, resigned to bewilderment, did as told.

“Now. What was pursuing you? It could help me with my canvassing. I’ve been sent on special assignment to investigate the sightings of a… disturbance in this area.”

The pair looked back and forth at each other, their bewilderment curdling back to that terrorized sheen Astra had seen in youthful cadets the first time they approached aliens with inexplicable power.

“Lady General, you wouldn’t believe us if we told you,” the boy said.

“Try me.”

“We were at the back of the retreating line that was headed east, helping to burn the bridge at Chattanooga Creek,” Magnus answered. “Hooker was on our tails after fighting in the clouds all day, so Bragg pulled back to the encampment at the Ridge, and Commander Moore made it very clear we weren’t to follow up to camp until we’d all but blocked every passing from Lookout to the Mission. Said it would slow the pursuits.”

“But it was a mighty feat getting that bridge to burn in the weather, Lady General,” Virgil continued. “A fine, misty rain came down, like the clouds were pursuing us, too, like Moses with his tablets off the Mountain, but we finally set the bridge alight.”

Much of their story was incomprehensible, but Astra made out the highlights. A battle, pursuit down a mountain at higher elevations, and the burning of passages, especially bridges, so that enemy combatants wouldn’t follow their trail. It was standard procedure that she had followed for years in command.

“How large was the bridge?” Astra asked. “And… if you were indeed in battle, would it have been possible for enemy combatants to ford the river at another area? Downstream? Or further north?”

“Maybe, but they couldn’ta brought along the canons. Not without some kind of ferry boat. Which is why Moore told us to torch the two crossings.”

“From the underside,” Magnus explained. “Where it was still dry.”

“The bridge caught almost too quick. Burned out the center section before we could cross back to the east, and that’s when that… that _thing_ came outta the smoke.”

“A thing?” Astra asked. “What sort of _thing_ can appear from smoke?”

“A demon,” Magnus whispered.

“The devil hisself,” Virgil reaffirmed.

“Though your commitment to the sacred religions of your region is… plausible, I suppose, it is not likely. What did the being look like?”

“Smokey,” Magnus said. “It was white as ash, then black as pitch.”

“Like thunderclouds going grey, creeping between the valleys before they let loose and wash ‘em out.”

“So… amorphous?” Astra asked. “Gaseous?”

“Huh?”

“Pardon?”

“You said it looked like a cloud,” Astra continued, her patience wearing thin as the men’s filthy uniforms. “It didn’t hold its shape? Or perhaps… was it some sort of plasma?”

Again, it took the men a moment to puzzle out what she was saying, as if they hadn’t heard about any of Superman’s escapades against the various psychic, shapeshifting, multi-mattered hostiles he, or Supergirl, had defeated over the past several years. It was almost as if these men were completely clueless about any relatively modern scientific inquiry, so much so that Astra gave up with her questioning and tried to meet them where they felt comfortable explaining.

“Never mind, just… can you start from when you first saw it? Did it have legs when it moved? Arms? A torso?”

“Not… until it started chasing us,” Magnus said. “Looked like it took a minute to… to form, or what have you, from the smoke on the water. Then it kinda… clumped together.”

“Like some transmogrified beast—what’s that one from the stories, Mangus? The Ky… the Kimer—?”

“The chimera,” Magnus, answered. “It was big, larger than some of the fortification housings on the ridge side. Big as a myth, but… maybe a bear? Or a mountain lion. But it… it seemed to walk, two-legged, chasing us fast.”

“But we know that eastern slope real good,” Virgil said. “We’ve occupied the mountain for going on four months, wasn’t until Hooker made the push early morning and drove us out we had to worry about closing the trails.”

Trails didn’t seem to be closed whatsoever, for as Magnus and Virgil continued their explanation, four men in grey stumbled out of the cane break, hollering and firing blindly behind them. Smoke rose from the muzzles of their rifles, and coruscating sparks drifted from the about their trigger fingers before burning into nothing.

“Down, I said _down_ , gotdammit—”

“—who art in Heaven, hollowed be thy—”

“—not a soul, not a bullet, none would deliver us from the hurt—”

“—on Earth as it is in Heaven—"

Virgil and Magnus quickly turned their weapons on the men in grey, heavily bearded but just as skinny and shabby as the previous pair appeared. Astra, without Alex to guide her, was at an utter loss.

“Magnus,” Virgil muttered, as Astra scuttled past them to address the newcomers. “Yanks!”

“This area should have been evacuated,” Astra repeated, for what felt like the twentieth time that day.

Didn’t humans listen to emergency protocols? Given her observation of humans who took to the surf SPECIFICALLY during dangerous waters with strong, deadly currents, Astra felt weary, wondering why she didn’t know better by now, how humans felt compelled to do things which were extremely dangerous, nonsensical, and far beyond their physical capabilities.

She’d spent the better part of six months at Alexandra’s side, so she should most _definitely_ know better by now.

“Mam’ get _down!_ ”

“There be ‘a beast a’coming uphill.”

“Stronger than an ox, larger than a bear!”

“More deadly, and evil than a Confederate.”

“HEY!” Virgil shouted behind her. “I aint’ no eviler than you is!”

Astra’s head ping-ponged between Virgil and Magnus, who both had their weapons raised, and the quartet of grey uniforms that stood on her right.

Well, so much for subtly. She pressed against her ear and activated the com.

“Alexandra? Can you hear me?”

“Yeah, Astra… are you alright?”

“Yes, I’m fine, but I have some civilians here… or maybe they’re not civilians. They seem to be armed, and frankly, I can’t understand a word they’re saying. From what I’ve gathered, there’s something pursuing them up the eastern ridge.”

“An alien something?”

“By all accounts, yes, but that’s if I’m understanding them correctly. They speak… very strangely, Alexandra.”

“Astra, Alex is fine,” Alex reminded her, for the umpteenth time. “And yeah, southerners… just a different dialect, I guess. Where are you again?”

“Northernmost ridge, on the bluff south of the city. We’re near the outcropping overlooking the seven states, about 200 yards east of the giftshop.”

“Got it. I’ll be over in ten minutes. Don’t do anything crazy until I get there.”

“No promises, Alexandra,” Astra murmured into the com, bringing both arms up between the contingent of blue and grey uniforms, both of which had their firearms raised and pointed at the other. The metallic bayonets at the end of the rifles held by the men in grey shimmered in the sunlight, save for those portions of the steel that had been caked over in mud.

Or, on closer inspection… that didn’t look much like mud at all.

Blood, perhaps, but not—

“STAND DOWN!” Astra shouted between them both, and, miraculously, the men did as instructed, lowering their weapons.

As Astra had previously observed, the men in grey looked just as worn as their counterparts in blue; skinny, weak, and yellowing in the skin, likely due to malnourishment, fatigue, or perhaps eves a disease far more severe. It looked like the worst of exhaustion that soldiers faced (and Astra had seen soldiers face overmuch in the field), so she knew, then, that perhaps Virgil and Magnus were not hallucinating a battle of some kind.

“Who are you?” Astra finally said, addressing the men in grey.

One scraggly, squat figured waddled up from the group of four, his rifle set over his shoulder, the point of the bayonet over his gun towering over his shorter frame.

“Second Lieutenant Jenson, of the 15th Army Corps,” he grumbled in a half voice, as if he’d been shouting for hours on end.

“The Army of the Cumberland,” one of his fellow soldiers said, with a squeak from behind.

“Cumberland?!” Virgil shrieked, his terror over the beast on his heels dissipating instead to pure, unbridled amusement. “Awe Magnus, we sure could whip ‘em good! Cowards! Yellow-bellies!”

“Hush yourself,” Magnus mumbled, holding tight to the stock of his rifle. “They runnin’ from that thing just like us.”

And, as if waiting on some divine cue, the _thing_ Magnus referred to seeped out of the cane break in a gaseous blob of inky black smoke. Astra whipped her head from right to left and backed away from the edge of the brush, then tossed a stick into the smoke to see if anything would happen. She heard the _thud_ , and was relieved the stick didn’t explode into flames upon hitting the gas. But she still kept her distance, noting how the rolling tendrils of fog-like puffs curled outward and slinked along the edge of the path, heading directly toward the men in grey, as well as toward Virgil and Magnus.

“CLOSE RANKS!!!” Astra hollered loudly, pushing off the ground slightly to hover in the air. The men seemed more concerned with the smoke creeping towards them than with Astra’s momentary levitation. Their nervousness was palpable, for Astra felt more out of her depth than she had with many other aliens she’d faced on her consultation missions for the DEO. Nervous enough to check in with Alex again.

Astra placed a hand to her ear as she hovered above the seeping smoke, growing thicker as it crawled over stones and sunk down into depressions along the path.

“Alex, do you copy?”

One of the men in grey was shaking so badly he could hardly keep hold of his rifle. His eyes were wild and glassy, darting at every angle to catch the movements of the smoke beast. Astra could hear the violent chatter of his teeth, chatter so familiar she felt like she’d heard it before. Chattering, shivering from cold, from fear, from the hallucinations that set in from hypothermia. It felt violent, the nostalgia tugging at her, for all at once, she was back in her command tent, nestled amongst the snow drifts of Yygdern IV.

She asked the Kryptonian Lieutenant at the base of the mountain about supplies, about the relief ship, about the weather patterns and how many more inches of snow they would see that night. She tried to block out the memory of blood splatters on the snow, rivers of red as bright as a robin’s breast staining the crystalized white. She remembered then how one of her youngest cadets had lost an arm to a river of lava on that unstable, extreme planet. Every scream, every shout, every command she ever issued to combat the Tundra Barbarians… they all came flooding back as a tendril of smoke curled round her ankle in mid-air.

She was in Tennessee, on a mountain top chasing an alien, and yet she was lightyears and solar systems away, combating uprisings in the snow on her Kryptonian campaign.

The moment the smoke touched her, it felt as if kryptonite were shooting through her veins once again. She reacted instantly, not waiting for Alex’s reply to her second call on the com, not caring for the safety of the mysterious men in blue and grey suits, and most certainly not caring about herself. All she knew was agony and intense, raw memories of collective, shared pain from her troops, and so she did what she always did:

She tried to burn the memories away.

Astra shot beams of laser-red light into the billowing cloud of black and plunged into the vapors before her, swinging her fists and hoping her momentum would draw out the true enemy. The uniformed humans at her side had disappeared and Alex was nowhere to be found.

All Astra had were her memories, and black smoke on the mountain, swallowing her whole.

She plunged into the smoke further, ignoring the screams of her cadets, further still, ignoring the burn from the magma rivers on Yygdern IV. She dove and struck but didn’t make contact with anything.

All she knew was smoke, terror, memory, and the final blackness of unconsciousness.


	2. Chapter 2

“What do you mean they disappeared?” Alex asked, leaning over the railing with her coffee. She had donned a knit cap to combat the wind off the river, and her hands were clutching the paper cup of black liquid so tightly Astra wondered if she would crush the container.

The wooden planks of the bridge beneath them creaked in the cold and echoed as cyclists and couples strolling gloved-hand-in-gloved-hand over the river walk made their ways past them. It struck Astra that neither the beast, nor Virgil or Magnus or the men in grey, had left footprints on the trail, despite the wet leaves and caked mud built up on embankments that demarcated the walking area from the restricted mountain forest beyond.

It had been a shock indeed, to wake to Alex’s concerned face leaning over her, cradling her head in her lap as she radioed for help. She remembers blinking, and feeling extremely woozy, and shakily getting to her feet as Alex led her back to the front of the park and the eerie gift shop filled with gnomes. After quickly summarizing the situation for Alex, she sat for a moment, enduring the same questions nearly every medic on every planet had asked her since her career began:

Any pain?

Numbness?

Where did you fall?

Look to the right, and follow the light with your eyes.

You do realize I am… Kryptonian, do you not?

Assistant Director's orders, m’am.

She recalled having to excuse herself from the DEO medic who was, truly, just doing his job, but Astra had no intentions of breaking down before him, let alone the rest of the DEO team that had arrived shortly after Alex’s distress call. She merely described the black mass as it approached, listed off its characteristics quickly, and how touching the smoke triggered unpleasant physical, emotional, and mental stress. She didn’t get into details, deciding to spare her new DEO comrades the discomfort of hearing about her battalion losses on Yygdern IV.

She also, to Alex’s confusion, left out the bit about the musket-wielding southern soldiers.

She thought about how strange it would seem if she tried explaining the incident in detail to people who hardly knew her (the majority of which feared her). Even if she’d approached a neutral party like Alex, emerging from unconsciousness with twigs and grass sticking out of her hair, claiming she’d seen a pair of humans in blue suits firing ancient-looking rifles at a gaseous black beast…

Well, Alex would probably be disinclined to believe her. It was indeed a testament to the tentative trust they’d built between them that Alex wasn’t disregarding the scuffle entirely.

They’d retreated from the mountaintop after her check-up and a thorough surveillance of the area post alien-attack. The polymorphous beast hadn’t attempted to pursue their party after Virgil and Magnus evaporated into thin air.

But the entire affair was one of the oddest, most disconcerting missions Astra had ever experienced.

Sightings of a large _something_ had increased significantly throughout the southeast in September and October, reaching their peaks in this area of Tennessee all throughout November. Four people had gone missing, and it seemed as though the gaseous beast was the source of local wariness.

Astra had made as many mental notes as she could while in the being's presence, notes that, looking back, fed a discordant fear deep within her despite the number of enemy hostiles she herself had faced in her decades on the battle field.

Firstly, the creature was a shapeshifter. Shapeshifters she had combatted on many occasions, some so small they would crawl into the ears of her own soldiers to implant tiny explosives, leading to erupting skulls during morning drills that resulted in half a contingent of dead Kryptonians with grey matter running down the fissured bones of the cranium. Some could grow, and tower over cities, covering entire buildings with their feet and swatting at her battle jets like flies. This thing… it wasn’t its size, but its insubstantiality that set Astra’s molars grinding. It was almost as if the creature hadn’t even cared about her, so focused was it on Virgil and Magnus. Her laser stare had done nothing but burn the brush behind it. And when she flew towards it… well, awakening from that attack had certainly been one of her more graceless moments. And it left Alex hovering over her, bewildered, concerned, wondering if she had hallucinated the entire affair.

Astra felt weak in the knees, drained, as if she had truly marched and fought and fled through the snowdrifts of another planet on high alert. Thank goodness for her Kryptonian recovery time, or she would've fallen asleep with her head resting in Alex's lap.

“What do you think I mean?” Astra huffed, circling her thoughts back to the present. She propped her elbows on the bridge’s railing, casting her gaze toward the mountain over the river’s southern trajectory. “They vanished.”

“A teleport?”

“No, most certainly not a teleport.”

“How do you know?”

Astra couldn’t suppress an eye roll. “Name one person you work with who has experienced more teleportation or warpspeed devices than I have.”

“Fair point,” Alex conceded. “But just… vanishing. Is that an ability in a humanoid you’ve ever encountered before? Kara said that Barry, over in the other universes, he’s so fast he looks like he’s vanishing—”

“I also have super speed. It wasn’t that.”

“There’s got to be another explanation,” Alex narrowed her eyes, squinting against the sun. “A cloaking device, or some sort of optical… diffusion… matrix.”

“I’m convinced your R&D division simply puts ‘matrix’ after every device name so that it seems more official than it is.”

Alex chuckled. “You’re probably not wrong.”

“I know I sound foolish, but I swear to you, those two men, one a boy, really, with the strangest speech…” Astra turned to face Alex, pushing a soft, centering breath through her lips. Alex started back at her openly, patiently, waiting for her to put the words together that would help them complete the mission: “I appreciate you keeping this information from the group until we could confirm it, but Alex, they did not feel as if they were of this plane. They looked at me as if I were truly _alien_ to them. I know I can pass for a human, Alex, in these clothes you demand I wear—”

“You’re blending in, don’t get huffy,” Alex chastised.

Astra looked down at her puffy navy vest, the layers of long-sleeve, orangey-plaid fabric on her top and soft denim encasing her legs. Alex had made her wear a knit hat, too, tugged snugly over her curls. When she’d tossed the more dirtied and scuffed blazer-and-slacks combo that screamed _Federal Officer_ into the back of the van, Astra momentarily thought Alex was going to let her wear her battle suit once again.

No such luck.

She looked like a hiker, which Astra had concluded was the common descriptor for humans who were terrible at sports, but who wanted to seem athletic.

Hiking was just higher walking.

“You know… I think I need to get in a cable-knit sweater or some Patagonia gear, too. I still look like a fed in this get-up.”

“Regardless of what _we’re_ wearing,” Astra continued, pulling self-consciously at her sleeves, “those costumes the men had were dirty and worn. Magnus had patches at his elbows, and the boy, Virgil, he had rips in his pants leg right over his knee. They… there was something… _unsettling_ about them, Alexandra.”

“Many people find the deep south rather unsettling,” Alex remarked. “Humans included.”

“I think we should go back. I need to know what happened to them. They kept saying they needed to get back to the creek. Something about a map, and bragging, but the beast kept them from their unit.”

“Unit?” Alex perked up. “Like a… like an Army unit?”

“Perhaps,” Astra said, turning back to gaze at the river, unable to stomach Alex’s incredulous stare much longer. “Though I think even human weaponry isn’t as primitive as the rifles I saw those men carrying. The spears over the muzzles looked like accoutrements I have not seen since Yygderyn IV.”

“Wait, so you say grey and blue uniforms, primitive rifles, strange speech—”

“They called me _m’am_.”

“Again, not all that uncommon in the American South.”

“Even so, whatever ‘unit’ they were trying to get back to didn’t seem to be missing them. They hardly looked like soldiers. Virgil, the boy… he could have been Carter’s age. Blonde, skinny, like he hadn’t eaten a decent meal in weeks.”

“And Magnus? The one dead-set on shooting you?”

“Looking out for the boy, I don’t think he would’ve killed me. Which is more than I can say for you when your mother showed me those photos of you and Kara at the school-time _prom_.”

“You promised not to mention that again,” Alex scoffed good-naturedly. “And I wouldn’t have killed you, obviously,” Alex continued, leaning beside her on the bridge railing. She fiddled with the empty cup in her hands, her fourth coffee of the day, Astra noted, and stared up at the mountain they’d just descended.

“Since you’ve gone back on your word and brought up terrible memories of my teenage fashion, I’m putting the Kryptonite inhibitors up to eight the next time we spar. But back to Magnus. Description?”

“Six foot one, two-hundred and forty pounds. African American male, likely a laborer if not enlisted. Numerous callouses on his hands, a hooked scar on his left cheek, and a terrible scar, a brand of the letter _T_ , on his left hand. They both would be easy to identify again, in those clothes.”

“A scar… no, a _brand_ , Astra?”

“Yes.”

“Are you certain?”

“Absolutely.”

“You were standing pretty far away, from where you showed me.”

“Your skepticism in Kryptonian x-ray vision is most reassuring, Alexandra.”

“I’m trying to make absolutely sure, because Astra… who you’re describing…”

“You know them?” Astra asked, finally turning sideways to regard Alex once more. She most certainly didn’t look pleased, not like they’d made any major break in the case, only that Astra, somehow despite her attempts at helping, had somehow made their job more complicated.

“Come with me,” Alex said, tugging on her arm. “There’s something I need to show you.”

 

* * *

 

 

“You think I hallucinated.”

“I didn’t say that,” Alex muttered defensively.

“Worse, then. You think I’m _insane_.”

“I didn’t say that either! Stop putting words in my mouth!”

Despite Astra having contemplated putting her tongue in Alex’s mouth, she was rather perturbed with the woman’s suggestion, that Astra had… _imagined_ an extremely detailed interaction with soldiers from an American war that had taken place over 150 years previous.

“Then what is your theory, Alexandra?”

“I don’t know…” Alex said, shuffling away from the glass casing. “But if what you’re saying is true, we can’t rule out the supernatural.”

Alex had dragged her downtown, amid brick and mortar businesses, shops, restaurants, all with a bustling metro feel. If the buildings were a little taller and a little closer together, she could imagine they were home in National City.

Or maybe not. Alex had never called her insane to her face in National City. And it had never gotten this cold.

Astra stuck her hands in the pockets of her vest and turned away from the marker. It was one of several situated around the city, recounting movements from the Chattanooga campaign and the Army of Cumberland during the American Civil War. From what Astra had gathered in her brief scan of the placards, some 150 years ago, several southern states declared sovereignty and a civil war ensued. From a quick Google search, Astra discovered she had likely been speaking with two soldiers of the _Confederacy_. The other soldiers who had stumbled out of the cane break with Lieutenant Jenson and the Army of the Cumberland, they were fighting for the _Union_.

And while the placards painted a stalwart telling of Confederacy objectives and the quest for heritage preservation, Astra had seen similar arguments before.

The slave holders in the southern states put more stock in monetary investments than in humanity. So they fought back. And lost, thank Rao.

Although, if the divide was predicated upon race—

_Why did Magnus wear the Confederate uniform?_

“Can you tell us anything more about the people you saw, Astra?” Alex asked.

“I’ve already given you their descriptions.”

“I know, but, we’ve got to be missing something. If you saw these men—”

“I _did_ see them. I _spoke_ with them. I am _not_ confused.”

“Astra, work with me here,” Alex said, reaching out to place a cold hand on her shoulder. Even through the puffy layers of vest and flannel, Astra could feel the chill in Alex’s fingers. “You told me… severe emotional and mental distress, when it touched you. You looked—you looked like that day you came to me, when you knew Kara was under the Black Mercy. And those men, running from the beast, it obviously scared them. What did it do to you, Astra?” Alex asked sincerely. “To knock out a Kryptonian… that’s gotta be some kind of fire power the likes of which we’ve never seen before.”

Astra didn’t like Alex’s eyes on her. With the rush of cars beside them on the street, and the clear, cold sun overhead beaming down on them, how could Astra ruin their tiny sanctuary of normal? How could she introduce Alex to only a fraction of the loss she’d endured in her other life, and stomach her withering, pitying looks?

“Astra, please,” Alex insisted, squeezing her should delicately. “You can tell me.”

Could she? Could she trust Alex with this burden, like she had trusted her with so many others?

“Your hands are freezing,” Astra said, taking the one at her shoulder and rubbing it between her own. She pulled Alex’s other cold hand into her grip and brought them up to her lips, blowing warm breath into the cocoon of her palms. She stared down at Alex’s hands as she worked, rubbing the feeling back into each individual finger.

“Yygdern IV was a relief and rebuild mission,” Astra began, rotating Alex’s left pinky against her index finger and thumb. “I led a battalion of troops protecting the city’s inhabitants from outside invaders, while rebuilding the trading centers and domestic areas the invaders had destroyed. We were allies, for their people mined precious minerals from the snowy mountains on-planet. They were primitive, but we held a sanctity for the ways of their people, and we did not press them for development. But  the minerals they mined were used in Kryptonian energy production, so they were important. Allies, said the council, but I knew better.”

She spread the fingers of Alex’s left hand in her own, linking their palms together and vibrating her hands at a speed that produced a warm, tingling friction against her skin.

“Assets, really, and I was sent to guard the Kryptonian investment. But the invaders were ruthless, and despite their primitive ways, the cold and extreme conditions—rivers of lava, Alex—we were unaccustomed to fighting on such terrain. I lost half a contingent in hand-to-hand combat, and saw three soldiers tossed into the rivers, burned alive. Or… drowned, I suppose. Can you burn and drown at the same time?”

Astra felt Alex’s hands tense beneath her hold, so she dropped them, and carefully lowered her hands to her sides.

“I heard every scream the moment that smoke curled around my ankle. I felt snow crystals stabbing my face and my blaster circuits malfunction so that I had to reach for my knife. I felt hot blood run on my hands and I heard those men behind me scream… I heard the children of Yygdern IV screaming, Alex.”

“Oh, Astra,” Alex said, stepping closer, raising her hand to brush a tear from rolling over Astra’s cheek.

She hadn’t even realized she’d been crying.

"I was so tired," she managed. "Waking up in your arms... I felt like I just stepped off the battle field."

“I’m so sorry.”

“You did nothing wrong,” Astra said, shaking her head and attempting to move away from Alex’s comfort. It was self-sabotage of the cruelest sort.

“No, I know, I just—I wish I’d been there to help you.”

“It’s the first time I didn’t know how to fight,” Astra confessed, her head hanging low. “I’ve only ever heard of something like this affecting memory on a physical scale on one previous occasion. And I’ve fought many battles before, but we had a division of elite troops who would deal with psychic weapons. That would be my best guess, Alexandra. It took my memories and made them real again.”

“Let’s reconvene with the team and hop on a conference call with Brainy,” Alex insisted. “We’ll go back to Vasquez’s base and see if we can boot up her system.”

“Can you… could you keep my— _episode_ —between the two of us?” Astra asked. “Your soldiers fear me, and… and I don’t want to seem unhelpful, but I do not need everyone knowing intimate details of my past.”

Alex smiled warmly, gathering Astra’s hands around her own once again and bringing them up between their chests. At some point during her recollection of the memories, they’d moved closer together, like magnets drawn near in an inescapable field of attraction.

“Only if you rub some feeling back into my fingers again,” Alex said. “We won’t make it to Vasquez’s place if I can’t grip the steering wheel.”

As much as Astra was grateful that Alex did not linger over her painful recollection, she was perhaps even more grateful that Alex used the pretense of cold hands so that she might be able to touch her again. If speaking to Alex about her past fears was cathartic, touching her was balm, salve, and healing elixir altogether.

It would be a challenge, as it had been since the day they’d met, for Astra to keep her hands to herself.

 

* * *

 

 

“I have never heard of such a thing,” Brainy remarked awkwardly, unaccustomed to being stymied by, well, anything, really. “I have searched the annals from the first century of earth forward, as well as records from galaxies and universes abroad, yet there is no description of such a being. I fear I have failed you, Assistant Director Danvers.”

Alex sighed as she stood at the kitchen table, the projection of the young Coluan taking up half the wall space of the modest AirBnB Vasquez and Green had taken over since they’d arrived in the city. Labtop computers and black bags of various sizes were scattered around the modest apartment, a pull-out couch unmade one room over and towels piled haphazardly in the washroom down the hall. Beside the couch lay two firearms, one deconstructed and housed in its carrying case, the other a handgun without a magazine, lying benignly on the end table. Astra stood back against the door as the other agents settled around the small kitchen table, typing furiously on their respective tablets and smart phones, searching every government database for some versions of “memory-menacing smoke monster.”

“Nothing even in the DEO logs… did you check in with Superman and his records at the Fortress?”

“I said I checked logs from multiple galaxies and universes,” Brainy said plainly. “If there is a record of such a creature, it does not exist.”

“Perhaps not a written record.”

J’onn appeared over Brainy’s shoulder in the projection, which engendered a happy round of salutations from the agents round the table.

“You were saying, Sir?” Vasquez answered, after a round of well-wishes. “Are there records of this alien that we don’t have access to?”

“There are no written or digital records, but there are instances of attack in living memory,” J’onn surmised.

“Why do I feel like this isn’t within _human_ living memory,” Vasquez asked.

“Because you’re quite perceptive when you slow down and assess, Agent,” J’onn said. “The being you’re combating has many names, none of which are definitive for identification, because all races that have come into contact with it have feared writing about it, have feared preserving its influence.”

“And why is that?” Vasquez asked.

“Because… it’s memories,” Alex said, her brow furrowing as she quickly worked it out. “It’s a beast that feeds off of memories, and dark ones at that. And the darkest of those memories would be ones that it prompted, wouldn’t it? Which is why nobody would want to write about it. Why no one would want to record what it could do… or what it _did_ do. That's another memory right here. Adding fuel to the fire.”

“Exactly, Alex,” J’onn said.

Astra noted that the Martian, in civilian clothes in his human form, did his best to suppress his proud smile. But he didn’t. He had taken a less active role in the running of the DEO as Alex stepped up, time and time again, to lead the agents against hostiles, and to intercede on behalf of the earth when aliens were striking out in fear, not in anger. He had been on something of a sabbatical for months, and Astra had watched for months as Alex grew more and more capable, gaining more and more responsibility. It both thrilled and terrified her, for it was the exact same path she had taken, and she remembered every stumbling block tossed in her path by the High Council, buy the High Borne, by some of her family members. Yet Alex surpassed each challenge, and would surely overcome this one as well.

Astra only hoped she wasn’t the reason for mission failure.

“If it’s composed of memories…” Alex began.

“…perhaps it feeds off of the psychic energy left by the most violent of memories that remain in the area,” Astra finished, figuring out where this was going a bit quicker than the rest of the agents. Fearing, more acutely, for she knew what type of prey the being might find most appetizing.

“The Green Martians only know of it due to its prominence in oral histories,” J’onn continued. “As I said, there is no one name, but it has been referred to as Devourer of the Past, the Memory Vice, and a History’s Abyss. No one knows the origin of the species, or if there are multiple entities. Everything it touches, it drains. It leeches memories of past losses and they fester, feeding it, so that the next victim must withstand the horrors the first victim once endured. The most common name is the _Consumer_ , and it was spoken of only in legend.”

“Legend no more, it seems,” Vasquez quipped.

“That might very well be the case,” J’onn agreed. “Have there been any other movements beyond the episode on the mountain this morning?”

“No further missing persons reported, sir, but that doesn’t erase the four bodies lost since September,” Alex explained. “Four bodies too many. If this creature is truly as powerful as you say it is, should we pull in the east coast division for back up?”

“That’s your call now, Assistant Director,” J’onn said. “Though I wouldn’t fault you for it if you did.”

“I guess that’s a yes, then,” Alex mumbled. “Green, get on the phone with the D.C. office. Patel, see if you can scrounge up a handful more hotel rooms or a larger space for rent. We’re looking at at least another half dozen agents.”

“More fire power won’t necessarily combat a psychic entity, Alexan—Assistant Director,” Astra spoke up. “Psychic energies… they are different forces altogether. Simple strength, or bullets, or… whatever the east coast division has in its arsenal, it might not be enough.”

“So how do we stop it?” Vasquez pressed, ever the pragmatist. “Any warnings passed down in the oral tradition, Director?” she asked J’onn.

“If it feeds off of what has transpired, it can be vanquished by that which is yet to come.”

“Be a little more cryptic, why don’t you,” Alex muttered under her breath, and Astra smiled silently to herself.

“Care to elaborate, Director?” Alex said to the room.

“I fear that’s a rough translation of the Martian,” J’onn said. “If its primary fuel is psychic memories, then the only way to combat it is through psychic potential.”

“And how exactly are we supposed to harness psychic potential?” Vasquez asked. "Can you load that in a magazine?"

“I can do some research on the use of psychic potential and report back to you shortly, Assistant Director,” Brainy said, his usually vacant expression somewhat befuddled by not having a direct link to the resources J’onn used to describe the Consumer. “If it would be a of any aid—”

“It would, thank you,” Alex said. “We’ll check in with you at 0800 CT,” Alex said, before pressing a button on the projector and disconnecting the line to the National City base.

“Okay team. Delta pair, on first patrol until 7 p.m. Astra and I will take the next leg until midnight. Vasquez, you and Patel on the midnight to four shift, and Green and Ambrose on the four to eight. Radio signal when you clock in, and send a code blue with any disruptions. In the meantime, free teams break for dinner and wait until we hear from the east coast division. I’ll update everyone once Braniac-5 gets back to me with the records on psychic energies.”

A chorus of ‘yes mam’s’ echoed through the small kitchen as agents darted about to pick up their gear. Two agents quickly departed before the rest to load up the SUV to take first patrol around the city; Alex had given them previous instructions to circle the areas with reported activity and contact the squad with any updates. Others finished up making notes on their computers, and Alex hovered over Vasquez, pointing at a monitor here, answering a question there.

Astra abandoned the group to their tasks, turning on her heel to exit the tiny entry-way of the apartment they’d commandeered as their headquarters. She leaned against the wall outside, wondering if, as she had supposed for quite some time, Alex would assume head of command after this mission.

_Director Danvers_.

Well, she most certainly deserved it. Asked all the right questions, and had learned in her brief but impactful service about the nuance that came with alien interaction. Were the hostiles attacking people? Ransacking businesses? Overtaking abandoned properties? Or were they simply protecting themselves, searching for food, seeking shelter? Placing these trials upon young shoulders was the Kryptonian way, and Astra thought how well Alex might have done if their roles were reversed—if Alex had somehow found herself on an alien planet, trying to make her way in another world. She would adapt much better than Astra had, that was most certain; finding more purpose than tagging along on her family member’s missions with an organization she did not feel completely at ease with.

Perhaps once Alex took command, it would be easier for Astra to distance herself from her. It would make her feelings subside, perhaps, if she did not seek out Alex’s presence on missions so often. Perhaps she could be relieved of mission work fully, to save herself the awkward interactions with the human agents she’d likely be paired with in Alex’s absence.

“There you are,” Alex said, emerging from behind the storm door, letting it bang shut behind her. “Find something new to brood over, or is the _Consumer_ still bothering you?”

“I do not _brood_.”

“You totally brood. You were just doing it,” Alex insisted, ducking her head to catch Astra’s stare. “I flipped a coin with Vasquez and we got the SUV rental,” Astra said, thumbing over her shoulder toward the car. “We’ve got four hours till our patrol time and I haven’t eaten anything all day. You want to go find pizza?”

A chance, however brief, to leave the agents? To leave the foreboding sense that an entity called _the Consumer_ was free-ranging the mountains, and that strange (probably dead) men were cropping up in its path? To leave their station and grab food with Alex, and talk about easy things, like Kara and extra green peppers and why Alex always laughed at her whenever she broke the locks on the changing room lockers?

“That sounds quite wonderful, I would enjoy pizza very much,” Astra responded, trailing after Alex toward the car parked curbside. If their patrol this evening was half as eventful as their mid-morning escapade, they would definitely need some food to fuel their fight.

They were both in for an eventful night.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> ty so much for reading, this is such a wild premise! getting back into the swing of writing after an absolutely hellish semester, so hoping to wrap up some old wips as well
> 
> .... we'll see how that goes. Hope you guys enjoyed all this plot :D more action to come!

**Author's Note:**

> listen it might not get finished any time soon but i'll be danged if I don't post SOMETHING for general danvers week. Keep the spirit alive, folks. 
> 
> The title comes from a song by Shovels and Rope
> 
> Happy Halloween, y'all


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